Lecture № 4 Linguistics (descriptive) in the usa

Descriptive linguistics developed from the necessity of studying half-known and unknown languages of the Indian tribes.

At the beginning of the 20th century these languages were rapidly dying out under the conditions of 'American culture', or 'American way of life', which had brought the Indian peoples poverty, diseases and degra­dation. The study of these languages was undertaken from purely scientific in­terests.

The Indian languages had no writing and, therefore, had no history. The comparative historical method was of little use here, and the first step of work was to be keen observation and rigid registration of linguistic forms.

Furthermore, the American languages belong to a type that has little in common with the Indo-European languages: Descriptive linguists had to give up analysing sentences in terms of traditional parts of speech: it was by far more convenient to describe linguistic forms according to their position and their co-occurrence in sentences.

The description of a language became more refined at the beginning of the 20^th century due to the development of the concept of 'phoneme'. The con­cept of phoneme was worked out by the Russian linguists Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Kruszewski, and developed by the linguists of the Prague School

Franz Boas is usually mentioned as the predecessor of American De­scriptive Linguistics.

The American linguists began by criticizing the Praguian oppositional method and claiming a more objective—distributional—approach to phonemes. But it soon became clear that the facts established were the same, and only the approach was different.

The American Descriptive School began with the works of Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield. American linguistics developed under the influence of these two prominent scientists.

Sapir studied a great variety of languages. He had many students who now teach in many universities in the USA and continue his work. His most known work is Language An Introduc­tory to the Study of Speech.

Leonard Bloomfield is considered to be a more rigid theorist. His book of the same title as Sapir's Language, is more systematic than Sapir's, and the treatment of linguistic problems is more modern.

To have a deeper understanding of modern grammar we must get ac­quainted with the main concepts of Broomfield's book.

1. Broomfield understood language as a workable system of signals, that is linguistic forms by means of which people communicate:'"...every language consists of a number of signals, linguistic forms".

2. Broomfield's understanding of 'meaning' seemed to be very unusual at that time. Later his concept of 'meaning' was developed by Charles Fries but even now 'meaning' is one of the problems linguistics seeks to solve. According to Broomfield, "the meanings of speech-forms could be scientifically defined only if all branches of science, including, psychology and physiology, were close to perfection. Until that time, phonology, and with it all the semantic phase of language study, rests upon an assumption, the fundamental assumption of linguistics: we must assume that in every speech community some utterances are alike in form and meaning".

The quotations clarify two things:

1. the meaning of an utterance can be found through the response of the hearers;

2. a sentence has a grammatical meaning which does not depend on the choice of the items of lexicon.

This can be illustrated by the following:

1. The selection of 'none' instead of'someone¹ changes the meaning of an affirmative statement into negative ("Someone has come—None has come"): the selection of an animate noun instead of the inanimate is possible only with a changed meaning of the verb:

"The wind blew the leaves away—The man blew his nose."

2. Broomfield understood grammar as meaningful arrangement of linguistic forms from morphemes to sentences. He wrote that the meaningful arrangement of forms in a language constitutes its grammar, and in general, there seem to be four ways of arranging linguistic forms: (1) order; (2) modulation: "John!" (call), "John?" (question), "John" (statement); (3) phonetic modification (do—don't); (4) selection of forms which contributes the factor of meaning.

3. He produced the definition of the sentence that is now accepted by modern American linguistics. This definition is given in Ch. Fries's book The Structure of English as the best among other two hundred definitions, and it reads as follows: "...Each sentence is an independent linguistic form, not included by virtue of any grammatical construction into any larger linguistic form."

Broomfield also said that a sentence is marked off by a certain 'modula­tion' or intonation.

He stated that in English the most favourite type of sentence is the 'actor—-action' construction having two positions. These positions are not inter­changeable. All the forms that can fill in a given position thereby constitute a form-class. In this manner the two main form-classes are detected: the class of Nominal expressions and the class of finite verb expressions.

4. Thus Broomfield has shown a new approach to the breaking up of the word-stock into classes of words, the syntactical or the positional approach Broomfield writes: "We shall see that the great form-classes of a language are most easily described in terms of word-classes, because the form-class of a phrase is usually determined by one or more of the words which appear in it."

These long form-classes are subdivided into smaller ones.

In modern linguistic works the nominal phrase of a sentence is marked as the symbol NP, and the finite verb phrase— as VP. The symbols N and V stand for the traditional parts of speech, nouns and verbs.

The selection of the subclasses of N and V leads to different sentence-structures.

The division of the word-stock into form-classes is developed in Fries' book “The Structure of English” and is dealt with in a most known article by Zellig S. Harris Co-Occurrence and Transformation in Linguistic Structure.

5. Perhaps Broomfield was one of the first to speak about 'utterance' as a linguistic unit. Meanwhile the concept of utterance is of importance for the study of unknown languages.

The first mentioning of the Immediate Constituents (1С) can also be found in Bloomfield's book. This theory of the IC which in the middle of .our century fascinated the minds of the linguists.